Comments

Posted by
VooX
from Behind the Bar in the Hasek Club Car on 07/20/10 at 11:39 PM ET

And TSN confirms this story as well. No details yet.

Posted by
VooX
from Behind the Bar in the Hasek Club Car on 07/20/10 at 11:40 PM ET

why would the NHL front office wait till late evening, the day after the signing to figure this out? Especially after the press conference to officially announce the deal… total bush league…what a joke

why would the NHL front office wait till late evening, the day after the signing to figure this out? Especially after the press conference to officially announce the deal… total bush league…what a joke

Posted by yzer19man from Chicago, IL 60610 on 07/20/10 at 09:52 PM ET

They need to go through it with a fine-toothed comb, this is a professional contract worth more than 100 million dollars, and it’s obviously structured to “get around the cap.” It took them “this long” to come to their conclusion.

Well, since the press conference wasn’t till today it’s possible the contract wasn’t filed until today. And the lawyers have to go through it pretty thoroughly before they can make any kind of decision.

If the PA decides to take this all the way to the system arbitrator, it may have some pretty big implications for the Devils and Grossman. An arbitrator can impose fines, or even take away draft picks.

The lawyers didn’t need to go through this contract with a fine-tooth comb to figure out whether they were going to void it, the info at Capgeek is all they needed to look at.

Write better rules about your contracts. The Kovalchuk contract doesn’t break any rules, it should be allowed. The NHLPA should be fighting for this one.

What a lot of people fail to remember when talking about how much damage a contract like this is doing to the league or the players is that it’s a risk for both Kovalchuk and the Devils. If Kovy wants to keep playing for the best trophy in all of sports when he’s 38, he’s going to do it for paltry money and the Devils are going to have to deal with having a $6M cap hit on a league minimum salary. That’s a risk that both sides have to be willing to take and they were. If the Devils just waive Kovy at that point, they deal with the fallout of screwing a player and how to attract free agents then. All the risk is on the individual team and the player.

If the league didn’t like it, they should have passed a rule change and had both sides talking about this before now. By simply voiding it, the league lobbed a softball to the player’s union to pick a fight they can definitely win, helping to strengthen their positioning in the next CBA talks.

If the NHL can suddenly do things based on “spirit” rather than actual written language, then why didn’t Matt Cooke get suspended for cheap-shotting Marc Savard when there was no officially written rule that said what he did was cheap?